Jane Semeka (5:44)

Yeah. So this book really covers the entire arc of American journalistic history from the 1840s all the Way up until today.

Brooke Kroeger (5:53)

Correct.

Jane Semeka (5:54)

So you seem like the perfect candidate because you have the academic background as well as the journalism background to do this. So I really felt that's how I.

Brooke Kroeger (6:03)

Think I got asked.

Jane Semeka (6:05)

Yeah, they picked the right person and you know, the, you know, the, in the women's history, from the women's history point of view, we talk a lot about restoring women to the story. And I think that, you know, restoring women to being known in history. And I'll never forget, I was in eighth grade and our English, I had a really fantastic English teacher in eighth grade named Mrs. Gilmartin. And she must have gotten some kind of a grant to get New York Times for the entire class for this whole year. So every day she would hand out the days edition of the New York Times. Everybody got their own copy.

Brooke Kroeger (6:50)

And that comes from the Times. The Times offers that to academics.

Jane Semeka (6:54)

Oh, great. Well, you know, this was 1980, I was an 8th grader and she made me so aware for the first time. She had us look at the front page as a class and said, how many women journalists are on the front page? And you know, that was like, aha. That was an aha moment for me as a 12 year old or a 13 year old, that on the COVID of this respected newspaper that there were no women journalists listed. And so that story, when I read your book, I remembered Mrs. Gilmartin and I remembered this idea of the importance of having women in the field of journalism and what does it bring. So, you know, that's what I hope we're going to really chew through today, talking about your book and, and what it means. So how did you just. Go ahead.

Brooke Kroeger (7:48)

I was just going to say that I have a little bit of a contrarian idea about recovery. You know, I, I, I get a lot of credit for recovering Nellie Bly. She was in the Zeitgeist. You know, she was in a popular song. She was in a Stephen Foster song. Back. The Knife, I think, makes a reference to Nellie Bly. There are things like that. So there were, you know, wisps of her that, that sustained, even though there was no biography and no archive. And there were two children's books from the 1950s, which a lot of young journalists, women who became journalists, who are of my era, read in the 50s. I'm one of them, which is how I got excited about the idea of being a journalist, as did many others. But so, you know, recovery there, you know, has seemed valuable because she's been restored in a real way. She's very much. Most. Many people have heard of her now and in ways they hadn't. So I feel, you know, quite proud of that. But there are plenty of other women, you know, that don't need to be recovered. I feel like the same way a lot of men don't need to be recovered in doing this work. You notice in the early journalism histories, women are pretty much left out, and even some very important women are left out. And yet I'm talking about the ones that academics have used, these big volumes that Journalism 101 often has as its book. They've obviously had new editions, and they aren't so exclusionary now, but in those early days, they're like that. Because I would go back and look at the first editions, you know, to see, okay, what were people saying? How was it? And there'll be the names of, like, 20 men who are sub editors of some kind or another that nobody cares about and don't need to be remembered. And so I think that's something we should keep in mind in recovery. That, like, recovery for recovery's sake is not really a value, but it should be thought about very carefully in terms of. Is it telling us something? Is it helping our history along? Are we learning something that we need to know?

Jane Semeka (9:57)

Yeah, I know for my. I could say that for my students, when we talk about what things that women did throughout American history that they weren't aware of, it really, for them, helps them to realize, to understand that women were significant and in whatever way that they just didn't know. And so it. It psychologically, definitely, I. I think makes a positive impact when we talk about women who have been forgotten about, who.

Brooke Kroeger (10:29)

Are important, or if you talk about what's happening in a given era to women who are really not supposed to be there. I think that's helpful, you know.

Jane Semeka (10:39)

Yeah.

Brooke Kroeger (10:40)

More in terms of the story in general, rather the story in specific, though the story in general is best told through the story in specific. So I think. I feel like this book is an inversion of a compendium or an encyclopedia. It's just not meant to be that at all.

Jane Semeka (10:57)

Right.

Brooke Kroeger (10:58)

Illuminate every decade.

Jane Semeka (11:01)

So, yeah, so let's segue into, like, the structure. And how did you decide who to include? Who got left out, you know, the structure is, I think really drives the momentum. So could you talk for a minute about that?

Brooke Kroeger (11:17)

Happily, I love to talk about structure and I think this is the right audience to talk about structure. So how do you approach a book like this? 180 Years of History. My editor was very specific. He felt like it had to be chronological. He was 100% right. And the chronology is so illuminating because seeing this history as a continuum, especially as someone who's done pieces of it, you know, and when you're doing a piece like you're doing the Vietnam War, or you're doing World War I, or you're doing the stunt girls or whatever, there's some great books on all these topics. But you're kind of going five or 10 years before and five or 10 years after and you don't really have the longer picture. So you start to attribute maybe more to that era than we ought to be attributing, you know what I mean? Because I like to use the example of Barbara Walters, such a major figure in television, certainly. But you know, Pauline Fredericks was doing this 15 years earlier. She's the more interesting figure from a standpoint of breaking ground. And yet she's quite forgotten. And so that kind of recovery makes sense because that's history. So that's the sort of thing I was talking about. So what did I do? How am I going to approach this? So I have access to a zillion databases, one of the great gifts of being a professor emerita. And I used to using them. So I apply the words women and journalism by decade, 18 times. And not scientific, as I say in the introduction, but it was a way to provide consistency. So I'm looking at women's magazines, general magazines, newspapers, academic papers. I'm looking at everything by era, by decade to see what burps up, like what comes out, what is standing out. I had one of my former students helping with the people I wasn't so interested in but thought I ought to know something about because of the way their names came up. So she was doing little praises about those folks and some of them ended up in the book because, oh my gosh, this is an interesting story that illustrates X, that sort of thing. Certain things would come up. Like I like to use this example of Dorothy Thompson, so forgotten and yet she was such a major figure. I mean major. She's the Beyonce of journalism of the 1930s. Really, truly. And that well known and that well respected and the blue eyed tornado, Richard Harding Davis in an evening gown. I mean, she's really something in the same year. Both the Saturday Evening Post, which is just about as middlebrow as you can get, does a profile, but not a one issue profile, a two issue profile. Who gets a two issue profile in succession? Who gets something like that? Then the New Yorker is doing exactly the same thing in the same year, a few months later, two issues on Dorothy Thompson. And that's, you know, at the more highbrow end of publications at the time. And remember, the 1930s is a period where magazines are the major form of entertainment. We don't have television, we do have radio, but magazines are home entertainment. They are it. So it's even a little different than having something like that happen now. It really matters in terms of popular value in the period. So I look at that and I say, wow, I have to pay attention to this woman. So then I would start digging deep. People like Anne Stringer, someone you've never heard of, she has a fantastic World War II story. I mean, it's one of my favorite stories in the book. And she's great at World War II. She's one of the Rhine maidens. You know, I find a story in Time about the Rhine maidens, three women who are breaking the military's code and they are barreling their way up the Rhine digging foxholes and reporting because they work for the news weeklies and they work for wire service and nobody's asked them to come do girl work, which is what most women are being asked to do. But. And the military is barring them from doing what these women are doing and kind of giving them a blind eye pass because they're like guys, you know, they know how to function in this environment, asking no favors and giving none, as Time said. And you can read what you want into that. Anyway, so her story is fantastic. And then on top of that, doing this extraordinary work during the war, which a number of women were doing, like Marguerite Hickens Gellhorn. I mean, many were. So that in itself doesn't make her interesting. But she goes to Nuremberg and is breaking story after story working with Walter Cronkite. So I know that's going to engage readers because that's really interesting. And then of course her personal story just knocks your heart out. She and her husband are supposed to go to war. I shouldn't give all this up, but I will because it's such a great story. They're supposed to go to war together. One for both for Reuters. He, he goes ahead first and before her papers come through because it's really Hard for women to get credentials to cover World War II. They're making it. The US military is making it very, very difficult. He gets killed, and this redoubles her determination to go. And so she doesn't get hired by Reuters as planned. UPI takes her back and she goes and does this extraordinary war coverage as a grieving widow. I mean, it's. And it's just kind of remarkable.

Jane Semeka (16:56)

So it's cinematic.

Brooke Kroeger (16:58)

It's cinematic. How would I leave out a story like that? And, you know, the way she covers the uniting of the US and Russia troops, that I will leave out. But that's fantastic. I mean, the reporting, the reportorial acumen, the brilliance of how she approached it and pulled it off to beat everybody on that story is just, you know, journalist in gold. So that would be a way a story would get in the book. And she's someone no one will have heard of. But does that matter? No. Like that.

Jane Semeka (17:30)

Yeah. And it advances your. Your big theme.

Brooke Kroeger (17:36)

Exactly. Every story is meant to advance the big theme, and that is more important than the individual to whom it is happening. Those women I was talking about from the 1860s and 70s, who I was going to leave out, I realized I asked 12 big questions that I kept asking over and over again to decide who belonged here. And one of them was, how did they get in the door when it was so hard to get in the door? And that remains true till Vietnam, really. Then it became easier. And it was easy in World War I and World War II, but most of those women did not last. They would retreat from the field. Some stayed, but many did not. They were filling gaps. But these early women who are really trying to break through, and the use of the abolition press as the first platform to me was completely fascinating. This was true of Lydia Maria Child, and it's true of Grace Greenwood and Gail Hamilton. And I just found that fascinating. Why? Because the abolition press would give them platform because they were cheap. I mean, Gail Hamilton works without a salary for six months or longer, and then he finally pays her something at the national era. That's fascinating because everybody is reading the abolition press. The big editors are reading it, they see talent, then they give them a leg up. One ends up at the New York Times and the other ends up at the Atlantic for very long careers. So that's fascinating to me, and I liked looking at that a lot.

Jane Semeka (19:11)

Did you. Can you also comment on the black press?

Brooke Kroeger (19:14)

Oh, sure. So that's a place where I made one detour, because this book is mainly about the mainstream Press the women who worked in it, not on the women's pages. I talk a little bit about the women's pages, but they are left out of this book very intentionally, not because I don't value them, but because this book, to be completely crass, is about women who are doing men's jobs, jobs men would envy at a time when women were not supposed to be holding those positions to a large extent. And even now, you know, we could go into that a little bit in this later years, but for the early period, that just seems really important to me. So I said, I'm going to write about the women who do men's jobs.

Jane Semeka (19:52)

Okay.

Brooke Kroeger (19:53)

I did leave room for Charlotte Curtis at the New York times in the 60s and 70s because she turned the women's pages into a power nexus of that newspaper, which was extraordinary. And over 25 years at the paper, 20 of those 25 years, she really was at the top of the editorial heap in many ways. So she was important to acknowledge, I felt. And also she changed women's pages. I mean, many of the models that exist today, she was actually pioneering, and so gets a lot of cred for that. So I gave her place. And then one of her predecessors, Eleanor Darden, in the 40s, I included, because she was trying to break the mold and couldn't succeed. So she quit at the New York Times. She wanted women's coverage to go throughout the paper. She wanted them to stop writing fluff. And so what she does is quit, and then she forms a women's news service that lasts a limps along for about seven or eight years. But she really was committed to serious work, even though that wire service had a lot of fluff, too. But nonetheless, the impetus was really strong and with vision. So I did do a little segue for those two because I thought they were representing something particular and you could see how the Times was evolving. And then, of course, after Charlotte Curtis comes the big lawsuits and the civil rights legislation, which takes six years for women to realize that it applies to them. I mean, imagine how ingrained the subordination was that it takes six years to figure out that it's a vehicle you can use to change your employment situation with. With your higher ups. So that, to me, just says everything that it took long to say. Oh, this includes us. Like, oh, we're oppressed. Goodness me. So to me, that was fascinating.

Jane Semeka (21:56)

All right. Yeah. So did you have an audience in mind that you wanted to reach with your story? Did you have, you know, anything in particular?

Brooke Kroeger (22:04)

I mean, in my mind's, eye is women like me who've been through this because I knew they would be a core audience and young women coming up because I think this book is full of subliminal career advice. Not even so subliminal. I mean, there are so many do's and so many don'ts. One of the huge ones is the importance of networking, which you see from Margaret Fuller straight through. No matter how ingenious they were, no matter how talented, they had to know how to work a newsroom or how to cultivate the editors who were in a position to help them. And these women were masterful at this. And that was something I hadn't expected to find, but came through over and over again. You see Margaret Fuller cultivating Ralph Waldo Emerson, who she has this mad intellectual crush on, and then how his wife helps her and Horace Greeley's wife helps her. That's how she gets her job at the Tribune. Not only does Mary Greeley suggest that she come work as the literary editor for the Tribune, you know, the largest paper in the country at the time, 1840, but offers them her hostelry in their home. In their home. The same thing happens to Grace Greenwood and Gail Hamilton. They go live with Gamaliel. I can't even say it. The editor of the National Era in Washington. Well, those homes are nexuses of cultural New York and cultural Washington. So they meet everybody, I mean, master networkers.

Jane Semeka (23:44)

That's great. And I think the research is impeccable in this book. And so I really admire how you walk the line. That's so hard to walk in a book that is great, enjoyable reading as well as having fine academic research behind it. And so I really, I. I found that to be so admirable. And I really appreciated the fact that I really enjoyed reading it and then really enjoyed looking at the footnotes because I thought they were, they were really fantastic.

Brooke Kroeger (24:17)

So those footnotes include about 30,000. Much of the 30,000 words I cut because of length, you know, trying to keep it a marketable commercial length because this is Knopf, not an academic press. So I, I just couldn't get rid of that material. And I felt it also enhanced the thing. And I, I love that you said that about the book. I don't think everybody feels that way. But being a non journalist, because this book will carry a journalist pretty well, or someone who aspires to be one, but hearing that from you or that is not your metier is incredibly gratifying because, you know, I think, you know, maybe it's A little dense. I. It doesn't seem so to me, but of course I'm not a judge.

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Brooke Kroeger (25:34)

What are you eating?

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Jane Semeka (25:42)

No, it's a great raid and it really moves along. I mean, I think that, you know, it's not, it's not tedious, it's. It's not slow. It's. It. It really is fantastic storytelling. And I think that people will really enjoy reading it. I really do. I think it's a really interesting read. It's almost like you're reading a lot of biographies in their historical context of their era, which I really appreciated.

Brooke Kroeger (26:09)

You can say that 15 times since.

Jane Semeka (26:12)

So the name of your book is Undaunted. So how did women change American journalism?

Brooke Kroeger (26:19)

So in various ways. I mean, first of all, they introduce diversity. I mean, we could. No one would have called it that. But in introducing diversity, things change because another set of eyes is on things. So we see this in various ways. I'm going to skip ahead just to say, like one of the examples, Anna Quindlen's example was when she was at the Times and Geraldine Ferraro was running for vice president. She gets that. She and other women get the Times to stop describing their clothes. Like, why was that happening? Well, if no woman had been there and it's been set piece for decades to describe what the candidates are wearing, you know, how do you change your mind about that? I like the example of Charlene Hunter Gault, who, you know, in an episode gets the Times to stop using negro and to use black instead. And got the Times to change. And someone said, well, that could have been a man who did it. True. But a man didn't. She did, you know, and she wasn't the only black reporter on the paper. So that there we see that we know that women, if they didn't invent, they made great the form of the interview because women were very good at interviews. Women were very good at feature writing. That's why many of the women who even ascend to be editors have come through the feature track. It's not unusual. I mean, the better track to become an editor is to be metro editor or city editor where you're doing hard news all the time. But a lot of women did not get opportunity there. We saw it in, in the way the women were advancing out of the women pages starting in the 1880s. So we start with the stunt girls, Nellie Bly and her cohort. And that's, you know, that's kind of a funky form, but it gave women platform for the first time off, off those women's pages. They're young, they're beautiful, tiny cinched waists, million dollar smiles. And they're doing, you know, daring do. In Nellie's case, it always was, was with a social service agenda. That's what really set her apart, that she's always after stepping into the biggest issues of the day and trying to illuminate what the circumstances are for people. Then you have more important than Nellie, though, you know, I'm the Nelly person, but more important than Nellie. The two Ida's, Ida Tarbell and Ida B. Wells, who take this kind of precursor of investigation which the detective stunt girls are doing, and really bring it along into verification documents. So you've got Ida B. Wells on lynching, you know, game changing reporting, and Ida Tarbell on the oil monopoly. And in both cases, these women are coming out of a milieu where they know about these subjects in very visceral ways. They're not reporters coming cold. So I'm sure that helps. Ida Tarbell grew up in oil country. Of course, Ida B. Wells is in Memphis. I mean, you know, they're, they're subjects that come to them quite naturally, but then they do the hard work. So that's, you know, women, they're women. They're all three women. It's interesting to me that all three of them live around the same time. They're within five or six years of each other in age. This is the beauty of chronology. You know, that where you suddenly put together these things that you hadn't seen before or thought of. And I really went to some lengths to try to see if they knew each other or they commented on each other or if there was any kind of camaraderie or cross section, even if they weren't friends or together because they all live in different places. But there wasn't. And even I talked to several Tarbell biographers. Nobody knew of any Connection. The only thing I found was kind of a snotty remark from Ida Tarbell about women wanting to come into the field. She writes an article about what it takes to be a woman journalist. This is before her work on Standard Oil. And she has one comment where she says every woman should spend. Who wants to be a journalist should spend her patrimony on a political, economic education at the highest possible level. Which is really a slam to Nellie, who basically had a ninth grade education. I mean, it seems to me it was given the timing, I can't say that for a fact, but you kind of get that smell. And that any other sort of preparation for the field is going to end in nothingness because. And in truth, the stunt era played out very quickly. Then on the heels of the stunt era, we get the Saab sisters, another, not beautiful moment in women's journalism history, but another place where women got platform in the news pages because they were writing these schmaltzy sidebars to the court stories, the big court stories of the day, the trials of the century. And the model is Mary Sunshine in Chicago. I mean, that's, you know, that's kind of the model. And they don't last very long. They last just a few years. And embarrassingly. But you notice that the term stays in the language for every. You know, it's used in sports, it's used in everything now. So that's basically the negative impact. And then from them come the front page girls. So suddenly they find it. Editors find it auspicious to have at least one woman who's on the new staff. And these are very particular women who really can cope, who really are a man's idea of what a newspaper woman should be. Because Also in the 20s, women, we have women coming into the field, sexy, attractive women crossing their legs, sitting on desks, bothering the staff, cajoling editors by complimenting their ties. I mean, all kinds of things that do not do women credit. And maybe one or two of them, maybe many of them, make mistakes, ask men for too much help with their assignments, and maybe that's only happening once or twice. And then that brush tars everybody. And so women then have to fight against this imagery of them. The same way in the 1840s, they were fighting against people thinking they were incapable of critical thinking. Incapable, not just untrained, which is the fact, but that they were congenitally incapable and that those saws just remain, they don't go away for decades. So women, in addition to everything else, are fighting against that in the Victorian area Of course, era, of course they're fighting against their clothing, they're fighting against the need for chaperones, which, you know, society is requiring of them, even though plenty are doing it without. You know, it's just lots of impediments are put in their way and yet the best of them persevere. I'd say one more thing. The women, really exceptional, really exceptional, like Margaret Fuller, I mean, Genii, you know, exceptional women never had a problem in this field, have never been held back, have always been able to do very well. It's just that the women who are like maybe one cut below or two cuts below, but maybe better than the men do not get that opportunity.

Jane Semeka (33:55)

Right. And it seems like every, every era had its turning points and things. So I really wanted to talk a little bit about the 60s and I have a, you know, particular interest in. Well, I like all these eras, but I really thought that the 60s was an interesting turning point in this book. So can you talk a little bit about the impact of the women's movement, civil rights movement, and how they're influenced by women journalists?

Brooke Kroeger (34:21)

How the movements were influenced?

Jane Semeka (34:23)

Well, you know what's interesting, I never put Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, although I knew they were both journalists, I never looked at them as from that perspective and how they both ended up being, you know, national figures in the women's rights movement. I just, I kind of was interested in, in that question.

Brooke Kroeger (34:47)

So interesting you say that. So in their cases, they both start as journalists. Betty Friedan, I looked up her clips. So she wrote a little bit often for women's magazines. She had one or two better pieces that were actually about the environment, kind of interestingly. And she's a mom at home who writes. And that's a lot of what the feminine mystique comes out of, is that suburban, torturous experience. And Gloria Steinem spent a long time abroad doing something else, comes back to New York and starts to write. So she's a journalist. You know, we know everybody knows about the Bunny story. That that's an interesting. We can come back to that if you want, because I've got an interesting sauna. That's not in the book that I discovered after the book, when Barbara Walters died, after I would and had already been turned in. But they both morph into full blown activism. So I'm, from the standpoint of this book, I'm no longer interested in them when that happens because they're activists journalists. You know, traditional journalists by definition are not involved with advocacy unless they're working for the advocacy press, which of course, miss becomes so good for them. But that's not what my book's about. You know, it's. It's like the women's page book. Good for them, but it's not what the book's about. So I think, you know, I get these. But what about. But what about. I think, well, what about, you know, that's not my writing about. So anyway, that happens. So they're helpful in the format. I found some early Gloria Steinem pieces in the New York Times where she was looking at the women entering television and makes an interesting comments about how few women there are who are not carrying coffee or doing something rather superfluous, stories like that. So she already was thinking about these things. And when she does the Bunny story, which she says in her memoir that she was very unhappy about the result because people kept offering more and more prurient stories to do. It just wasn't doing for her career what she had hoped. And it was distressing in many ways. And then of course, over time, she realizes that people are still talking about it, what, 50 years later, and that she did get the Playboy clubs to stop, you know, touching women to assess their size to be bunnies, things like that. So it actually had, and it outlasted the Playboy clubs. So, you know, she found that it actually had value. What I found when Barbara Walters died is that Barbara Walters had done a Bunny story six weeks earlier, six weeks earlier on the Today show where she was working, I think, as a writer, but she was not on the on air staff. And I think this is part of her gambit. I mean, I don't know this, but I think it is to get on air because she doesn't get on air for another couple of years as a permanent person. But she must have volunteered to do this when the Playboy Club opened in New York because it opened two weeks before. Again, chronology is everything. And the piece is a fluff piece. It's about how it is to be a Bunny. How do you get to be a Bunny? What is the moral code of the Bunnies? How is it to be in the costume? How do you do the Bunny dip, you know, blah, blah, blah. And then the on air piece is with Hugh Downs, who was the Today show host. She's just little reporter. She looked great in the costume, by the way. And so they're talking about. He tells her twice how she looks in the costume. She does give him the side eye. She did. But when she's leaving early from the Playboy Club, the doorman says, oh, you're leaving early. And she says, I'm not, I'm paraphrasing, I'm not a bunny. I am a correspondent for the National Broadcasting Network. You know, like that. And, but she, but she says to Hugh Downs, I was kind of proud that he thought I was a bunny. You know, it's, it's the 1960s. And so it was so interesting to me that this total fluff piece is so few weeks before Gloria Steinem's expose. And not only that, while Gloria Steinem is reporting this, Betty Friedan's feminine mystique is on the newsstand. So, you know, there's obviously been prior publicity. And not weeks later, in May, the first civil rights legislation passes. So what a piece of history that is. I wished I'd had that for the book. But she unfortunately died too late for that to come out because NBC posted her bunny video. So that's how I figured it out. But again, doing the chronology.

Jane Semeka (39:37)

Oh, wow, that's, that's a great story. And so let's talk a little bit about today because this book comes all the way up through today and there are a lot of women running news organizations now.

Brooke Kroeger (39:50)

Totally.

Jane Semeka (39:51)

And so what are your thoughts?

Brooke Kroeger (39:54)

Okay, so a few thoughts. So you'll notice that a theme of this continuum is progress, setback, push, pull. I was just in an event the other night. I mentioned this in Bryant park the other day, but with Mark Whitaker, whose book is about 1966 and the rise of the Black Panthers. And he was talking about how civil rights history is one of progress, backlash. I use the word setback, but he uses backlash. And as he was saying this, I'm thinking, wow, that's women's history too. It's progress, backlash. So we're now at a point where almost every news organization, either on the editorial or the business side, is run by a woman. Shocking. And if you read the book, you'll see why that's alarming. Because when women come to the fore, things fall apart. Women are brought in when things are in crisis, war comes, men go off to war. There's place for women. A company is failing economically, suddenly a woman's in charge. I mean, this has been happening for a long time. Every time, like the first woman city editor in New York, the company fails a year later. The first black woman to be on a metropolitan newspaper in New York is a full time staffer, not covering black matters, but just covering life and, you know, news. The paper fails the next year. I mean, it just seems to happen. Over and over again. So you see those articles where they show a grid of all these fabulous women who are running things. And I'm going, oh, this is scary, because I care about journalism. So that's a concern. The other thing that's happened after MeToo, which I do quite a lot with, and you know, there have been some substantial lasting gains from that two, three year episode. But then what happens on the Internet to women now? And I've written about this. If you're writing about sensitive or controversial themes and you are a man, when the trolls come after you, they call you an idiot, they call you a hack, you know, things like that. If you're a woman, as someone at PEN America described it, you have your face photoshopped onto a pornographic beast and threats to rape your children. I mean, that's the difference. So someone asked me, you know, in these times of so much liminality and identity, gender identity, if the whole question of talking about women doesn't make any sense anymore. And I said, if you hear the reaction to what I just described to you from women or from some incidents we've had where some well meaning man has said something about women in journalism that puts people's hair on fire, it's still putting people's hair on fire. Which tells me the question of women is alive. And especially this Internet trolling that often ends up being physical as well, you know, becoming actual houses marked, etc. So I think that's all very live.

Jane Semeka (42:57)

I agree. And it is nice to see more women at the desk on TV journalism and intern and you know, the cable news journalism. It's nice to see more women there. And now when I look at my New York Times, there's a lot of women's names.

Brooke Kroeger (43:14)

Uh, but Jane, that also has to do with fields in crisis because the, you know, the traditional sociological theory on this is that the alpha males aren't coming to the field, they're going to do something else. So that is what's creating the opening where women are likely to be the better candidate. When I was at United Press, while the company was completely falling apart, not in the early days, but at the end of my time there, I had a great vice president and I was in charge in Europe, Middle east and Africa, based in London and looking around, I mean, most of our bureau chiefs were women even then. Why? Because Eugene Blaby would tell you they got better talent for what UPI could pay by hiring women. So that was in the 1970s. So I rest my case.

Jane Semeka (44:00)

Okay, well, it's a terrific book. And I thank you so much for being on the show today and for discussing How Women Changed American journalism, published by Alfred A. Knopf. Thank you so much, Brooke. It was a fascinating interview, and I hope everybody picks up this book and reads it. You're really going to enjoy it. Until next time on new books in women's history, this is Jane Semeka. Keep reading.

Brooke Kroeger (44:27)

Thank you, Jane.